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Location: Menlo Park, US West

Firm Rating:

Firm Information:

Type: Large Private VC

FIRM DESCRIPTION: Lightspeed Venture Partners is a leading global venture capital firm with over $2 billion of committed capital under management. Lightspeed’s investment professionals and advisors are located in Silicon Valley, China, India and Israel. Over the past two decades, the Lightspeed team has backed more than 150 companies, many of which have become leaders in their respective markets, including Blue Nile, Brocade, Calista, Ciena, DoubleClick, eHealth, Galileo Technology, Growth Networks, Informatica, Kiva Software, LightLogic, Maker Communications, Metasolv, Openwave, Quantum Effect Devices, Riverbed, Sirocco, Virsa Systems and Waveset.

I was introduced to these guys by a well respected figure in the tech startup world. Despite his enthusiastic email to LVP, the person I met with was negative about me and my business from the moment I started speaking (not to mention he was very late to our meeting).

Felt as if the guy made up his mind long before ever meeting with me and there was nothing I could say or do to change that. We are early stage and LVP new that before meeting us, but then seemed to expect us to be more established with customers than we are.

I pitched to Yoni and it was a treat. He was insightful, helpful and offered allot of great advice. I would love to have Yoni on my team as a board member or advisor. Regardless of the fund's investment decision the meeting was very valuable to me.

Out of the blue, we were contacted by LSVP since they had an interest in learning about us, making us a part of their deal flow and investing in us. They gave the impression of a serious and fast moving VC, and after substantial discussions, they simultaneously asked us to come and present to the "Team," as well as set up calls with our customers.

Net-net, they learned about the market from us and used the face to face to get introduced to our customers. After all that, they went silent for 6 weeks! No emails, no phone call returns, nothing. Eventually when I pushed them for an answer through one of the LPs, we got back some lame feedback saying we were "too early," something that they would have known after the first 5 minutes when we do our elevator pitch if it were true.

Beware:

1. They will "cold call" you from Press Releases.
2. They will use you to gain market knowledge.
3. They will try to get connected to your customers.

BUT know that

4. They will always be late to meetings.
5. They will not be prepared beyond the initial meetings where they bait you into the process,
6. They are not serious investors.
6. They do not have a DD process that is transparent.
7. They do not have any respect for entrepreneurs.

Had a chance to pitch Ashvin Bachireddy and the experience was solid. He understood the business and identified the key drivers of value. He was able to provide several novel approaches to dealing with a couple customer acquisition issues we were facing. Though we were too early for Lightspeed he provided a number of introductions for us and continues to be helpful. We were very impressed by his knowledge of technology, network of contacts and willingness to be helpful. A rising star on Sand Hill.

Posted by
Mariam Naficy, CEO & Founder, Minted.com
on 2010-04-04

PUBLIC:

Jeremy is very committed to the companies he gets involved with. He is an angel investor of ours and has been extremely helpful to us. He answers my requests for help on very short notice, taking the time to provide advice on a range of topics from recruiting to product to marketing. He has a rare balance of pragmatism and boldness for a VC, and has on several occasions come up with really breakthrough advice that no one else has been able to see. For example, he took a contrarian point of view in one case and pointed out that we were trying to build a systematic solution to one issue where a manual solution could be just fine and not cost me several months of engineering.

At a recent party, I got off-the-record extremely positive feedback from a founder whose company Board Jeremy sits on.

For what it's worth, I have separately worked with Lightspeed when it used to be Weiss Peck & Greer - they funded my first company, Eve.com. I had an excellent experience with Chris Schaepe, who sat on our Board. Calming personality, highly ethical, helped us deal with another investor who was trying to do some not-so-great things to the founders.

Posted by
Dexter
on 2009-12-11

PUBLIC:

Beware of charming associates who solicit you out of the blue, cajole you to cough up good market info and then proceed to be an entirely waste of time. AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE. LSVP are known foot-draggers and in this entrepreneur's view will forever be stuck in the second tier of VCs.

Met with a partner that was completely unrelated to our field, from the first moment he was negative for each and every word we said (including the first slide with the title...), we asked us to rush our pitch after the first slide...and then attacked our assumptions (that have been validated by top players in the market) as we were talking nonsense, although it was clear he has no clue about our market at all.....later on he called to turn us down....

Pitched early stage deal to Ajit Deora. He was attacking every sentence but couldn't pin us down for the simple reason that we had answers to all his concerns. Interesting experience but not very helpful.

Posted by
MartyManley
on 2007-11-28

Posted by
beaupeep
on 2007-10-26

PUBLIC:

Do other VCs hear your ideas too, even when they're at advanced stage of due diligence with your competitor" :)

Talked to a partner in India about our company. He was very attentive & seemed to know all about the space, which is rare. Little did I know that he was just gathering all the competitive info from me, while closing a round with our competitor. The announcement came 10 days later that they funded our competition. He could have simply told us "No Meeting". But then that would be too ethical" :)

Posted by
Bob Cell
on 2007-10-09

PUBLIC:

Background: I worked with Peter Nieh of Lightspeed Venture Partners to create MyBuys from the assets of another portfolio company in a very productive and creative manner in 2006.

Deal structure: Peter and his partners were very receptive to the idea of creating a new company with a new capital structure that would be attractive to management. In order for the new capital structure to come together, Lightspeed recapitalized their previous investment entirely and invested in our new venture with a new mindset (a difficult thing for many VCs to do as they often get caught in the emotion of the old deal's issues), new preferences, and a belief in the new team.

Future round assistance: Peter was very supportive in preparing me for our B round funding process. He helped tailor the message of the investor presentation to be well tuned for the VC audiences. He also assisted with many introductions to other VCs as well as providing strong support when discussing our team and prospects.

Funding result: We were able to receive many term sheets that were all significantly above our last round post-money. Lightspeed invested in the B round requiring only one presentation to update the partners on our progress since the previous round (in addition to Peter's reporting on us behind the scenes) and Lightspeed has also reserved for future rounds.

Board Member: As a board member, Peter lets me operate the company - and I appreciate that. He cares about aligning goals, the market, and customer traction. He also cares about the quality and the recruitment of the management team and will actively engage in recruiting team members, if asked. If I were an investor, these would be the things that I would also care about also.

Other Lightspeed assistance:
I have received multiple sales leads (Jeremy Liew's internet background and connections have been very helpful), several high quality employee candidates, and participated in several Lightspeed events as part of their ability to proactively assist their portfolio companies.

Overall: Lightspeed is a very professional and smart group of partners and I would highly recommend them to other CEOs. Please feel free to contact me direclty at rcell@mybuys.com with any questions.

Posted by
goodform
on 2007-09-03

PUBLIC:

If a VC takes an active role in your company, he/she can either be a help or a hinderance. You may havbe taken $$ from a VC Fund, but you end up having to deal - over and over again - with one Partner.

It would be greater if the Partner had extensive realworld experience. It would be even better if the Partner had a sense of humility, grace, decency and humor.

Posted by
phdlance
on 2007-08-09

PUBLIC:

We really value Jeremy's understanding of our space. He is someone who actively tries things out for himself and translates the best of Web 2.0 into suggestions for our own business.

For example, we were able to acquire a highly successful Facebook application before it even got listed in the Facebook directory. This was directly due to Jeremy having installed the app through his friend network and then recommending it to us. It is great when your VC gives you an inside scoop on acquiring 5M users.

Posted by
nabeel
on 2007-06-26

PUBLIC:

Very much enjoyed the meeting. Ravi was peppering with questions and Jeremy is very strong, so that was all good.

But Jeremy & Ravi showed up at least twenty minutes late. They apologized but later were commenting to each other about how they are always late. That should be corrected behavior, we've all got busy schedules.

Posted by
goodform
on 2007-06-23

Posted by
mrgeek
on 2007-06-01

PUBLIC:

I have worked with Lightspeed guys for 10+ years, in particular Peter Nieh and Ravi Mhatre. Good, hardworking guys and a good fund that understand enterprise software and how to nurture companies. They were beyond patient with some deals that went shitty after the dotcom bust.

On some of the comments here, note that if you do not know how to pitch to VCs they are not going to be so pleasant, so get a short elevator pitch down that communicates your value prop, don't expect meetings to start on time, and don't have more than 15 slides.